As we saw in the previous section, Roe asserted a new (but
invalid) government authority to permit the killing of the innocent. Once that
line is crossed, that supposed authority can be imposed on any group of people.
The infanticide, which the bishops call "a predictable next stop along the
continuum of killing" is already a reality.

Jill Stanek is a nurse
who came face to face with infanticide. She shares her story:

"I had been working for a year at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois,
as a registered nurse in the Labor and Delivery Department, when I heard in
report that we were aborting a second-trimester baby with Down’s syndrome. I was
completely shocked. In fact, I had specifically chosen to work at Christ
Hospital because it was a Christian hospital and not involved, so I thought, in
abortion….

But what was most distressing was to learn of the method Christ Hospital uses
to abort, called induced labor abortion, now also known as 'live birth
abortion.' In this particular abortion procedure doctors do not attempt to kill
the baby in the uterus. The goal is simply to prematurely deliver a baby who
dies during the birth process or soon afterward. One night, a nursing co-worker
was taking a Down’s syndrome baby who was aborted alive to our Soiled Utility
Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to
hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a
Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he
lived. "

Advocates of infanticide are now at prestigious posts in our nation's
universities. Peter Singer is a professor at Princeton's University Center for
Human Values. He openly justifies infanticide, and asks, "Is life at birth more
significant than at the second, fourth, or sixth month of pregnancy? It is not."
He explains further,

"The pro-life groups are right about one thing: the location of the baby
inside or outside the womb cannot make such a crucial moral difference. We
cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth,
but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The
solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human
being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very
opposite: to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth" ("On
Letting Handicapped Babies Die" as quoted in "In Defense of Life", Fournier and
Watkins, Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1996, p.43).

Singer sums it up this way: to be morally consistent, there are "only two
possibilities." Either "oppose abortion or allow infanticide" (p.44).

Legislatively, we have taken an important step forward in this regard. On
August 5, 2002,
President Bush signed the Born-Alive Infants' Protection Act,
which ensures that every infant born alive -- including an infant who survives
an abortion procedure -- is considered a person under federal law. This lays an
important premise into the law which is essential for further progress in the
defense of life, namely, that the law can protect a child at any stage of
gestation despite the will of someone else that the child die. The value of
that life, in other words, does not depend on another's choice.

Verbal Engineering

The manipulation of language is key to the revolution that brought about
the culture of death. In 1970, the journal
California Medicine
carried a famous editorial that stated the following: "Since the old
ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the
idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially
abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which
everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous
whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic
gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a
human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially
impeccable auspices."

The language used to justify assisted suicide is extremely subtle. I was
stationed in a NY City parish some years ago when a ballot initiative regarding
assisted suicide came up in another state. I asked the parishioners to contact
any friends or relatives they had in that state, to inform them of how harmful
the initiative was. A few days later, one of the parishioners told me she spoke
to her daughter, who lived in the state in question, and that her daughter
obtained a copy of the various initiatives that were to be voted on. She said
that the one I spoke about wasn't listed. I asked her to send me the list…And
right there on the list was the ballot initiative I had spoken of. This woman
and her daughter, even when they knew what they were looking for, couldn't find
it, because the language was so carefully sugar-coated. The initiative spoke
about giving "assistance in dying."

In regard to the cloning debate, a deceptive linguistic distinction is made
between "reproductive cloning" (presented as bringing the clone to birth) and
"therapeutic cloning" (presented as cloning someone to obtain helpful stem
cells). In fact, however, all cloning is reproductive and no
cloning is therapeutic. You have reproduced another person as soon as you have
that life at the single-cell stage, and no therapeutic benefits of this process
have been demonstrated.

Discussion Questions

How is language used to advance a Culture of Death? How can we begin to
use language to build a culture of life?

In what ways to physician-assisted suicide, fetal experimentation, and human
cloning reduce the human person to an object? How are these problems linked to
Roe vs. Wade?

Further reading

William Brennan, Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take
Lives (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995).

Click below to listen to a series of radio programs (Real
Audio format) with Dr. William Brennan discussing his book Dehumanizing
the Vulnerable.